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Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

nytimes.com

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Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

#261

Post by robotresearcher »

hueving wrote: post #237
huxley wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's anti-corporate not anti-technological, not quite the same thing. After all the open and free Internet is the creation of government departments and government-funded universities. I don't believe that anything as extreme as the parent suggests is necessary but I do believe that we should have enforceable transparency in the pharmaceuticals industry R&D costs and/or decoupling the drug trials system so that the t…

>It's anti-corporate not anti-technological, not quite the same thing. After all the open and free Internet is the creation of government departments and government-funded universities. The only thing that made it useful though was commercialization.

Imagine all the for-profit stuff on the internet went away. The remainder would still be one of the most useful things ever created by humanity.

Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

#262

Post by ken47 »

tmd83 wrote: post #255
ken47 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an economic and policy perspective, unfortunately, Turing is doing everything right. This is an economically misguided point of view. Free market decision-making can only be argued to be optimal in a free market system, which pharma is not, a distinction which the decision-makers certainly were intelligent enough to understand. Free market mechanisms either need to be put in place, or we need to stop allowing it…

I'm not sure I understand the point about economics being about utility vs. wealth. If its free market then aren't people free to choose between utility vs. wealth and in such case pure free market don't have much defense against a few sciopaths trampling all over the not so sociopaths?

It's almost never pointed out that Adam Smith, in his free market theory, was arguing for the efficacy of "enlightened" self-interest. I encourage readers to research this aspect of his theory, and how it contrasts with "unenlightened" self-interest. I think most reasonable people would agree that Adam Smith would categorize this CEO's behavior as unenlightened.

Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

#263

Post by infamouscow »

nickff wrote: post #241
johansch wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this one of those very few cases were nationalisation of a company is called for?

Why do poor business decisions make a case for nationalization?

Because we've agreed that the public can't hunt these people down and kill them for this kind of nonsense.

Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

#264

Post by Kalium »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #236
rayiner wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more ethically questionable: spending billions in capital developing drugs to save lives, and trying to make money off that, or spending billions of capital on endeavors like entertainment services that don't save lives at all?

>spending billions in capital developing drugs to save lives Loaded question. This assumes they are doing it to save lives instead of doing it to make money. And doing it to make money, given the patent system, is the less ethical option when others would do it to save lives but are now forbidden to do such.

> Loaded question. This assumes they are doing it to save lives instead of doing it to make money.

Not really. It assumes that the drugs save lives. If you pay $X for drug that was developed to save your live or $X for an identical drug that was developed to do a job and turn a profit, it's the same $X and the same drug.

Why people are doing things is generally less important than that they are. This is one of those cases. Demanding a particular mindset when all other things are equal is a little bit silly.

Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

#265

Post by robotresearcher »

ctlby wrote: post #127
JulianMorrison wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't comparable. Computers are tools. Drugs are health. They are a public good and a natural human right. Holding people's health hostage is unacceptable whether you do it with a knife in an alley, or a capitalist health system. Mixing them up like the USA system does is a category error.

Drugs are a complex good created through the intensive efforts of highly intelligent, trained human beings. They are anything but a natural right.

That is absolutely true, and is also true of clean drinking water, sewage treatment and security of the person. We can choose to make these things available by our common efforts.

Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

#266

Post by jerf »

clavalle wrote: post #155
jerf wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is "Let's write more regulations" is "let's keep things the same and hope it turns out better". It's easy to call for more regulations but it sounds a lot more to me like the core problem is a priority mismatch in enforcement. A lot harder to fix, but certainly step one seems to me to be to get people to stop calling for "more" regulation and start calling for the core problem of ineffective regulatory agenc…

I've seen these kinds of things up close (investigations and eventual prosecutions of exploitative companies in the health care sector) and I can absolutely tell you I am not pleased. But I also don't see the alternative. I don't think a free market approach would work. The government has a huge standing war chest. It can afford to take the time and expense to go after these bad actors. Even insurance companies are r…

I didn't say anything about a free market. I said, go fix the regulating agencies. Way harder.

I'm a libertarian, but I'm not an "anarchist" because I still think it makes more sense to have an industry, and an independent, focused, effective regulatory apparatus. When you fall prey to the regulatory apparatus' ploy to gain more power with yet more "regulations" by responding to their failures to use existing regulations to fix problems, you A: play a part in letting these sorts of failures slip by B: reward the regulatory apparatus' failures, creating more incentives for them to fail later and C: give them another vector to "fail" and need "more power" to fix their failures in the future.

You want regulations to work, stop falling for this obvious ploy and start holding your government servants responsible for the failures they are already abundantly equipped with the tools to solve, instead of playing the sap and joining in with the voices calling for more power, exactly as they want. They've got enough to handle this problem. Go take them to task, don't hand them more power even as they are demonstrating their manifold inadequacy to be given even what they have.

Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

#267

Post by nickff »

infamouscow wrote: post #263
nickff wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do poor business decisions make a case for nationalization?

Because we've agreed that the public can't hunt these people down and kill them for this kind of nonsense.

I have re-read your comment a dozen times, trying to grasp what you mean, and come up short each time. Do you mean to say that whenever a business makes a decision that you disagree with, you (or someone else) should feel morally entitled to go a kill the individuals working there? Or do you mean that whenever a business makes a decision that you disagree with, the state is entitled to focibly take the company?

I personally find both to be morally problematic (to say the least), and unless you can establish a viewpoint neutral rule for this new criteria for nationalization (or murder), it will be enforced arbitrarily and capriciously.

Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

#268

Post by Kalium »

mvanvoorden wrote: post #214
Bluestrike2 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit of a fantasy, isn't it? Pharma companies don't re-invent the same wheel: even in cases where they're pursuing similar avenues of research, the drugs being developed share sometimes significant differences (and in many cases, even insignificant differences can later be found to be more significant than first believed). Even if companies were somehow able to collaborate without any problem, the end result…

Every way of dealing with something has its flaws, the point is to fix them. The patent system is flawed in its foundation, i.e. claiming a discovery for yourself and keeping this technology away from the rest of humanity. For the rest, I wouldn't know why there wouldn't be multiple medicines. Labs would still come up with multiple compounds that have more or less the same result, and if not, research would continue…

> For the rest, I wouldn't know why there wouldn't be multiple medicines. Labs would still come up with multiple compounds that have more or less the same result, and if not, research would continue for the people who fall outside the bell curve of the other medicine.

The issue is that this process happens right now because of independent development due to competition. As soon as you unify multiple efforts into one cooperative effort, you no longer have multiple efforts that produce multiple viable drugs.

You're appealing to unify research efforts to put more wood behind fewer arrows to help people. And that's fine. It just that this has consequences, not all of which would likely be ones you want.

So, yes, the resulting medicine would BE the generic. And that's great! But there is a drawback. And these are just the consequences we can easily predict. We haven't even thought about the psychological effects of enforced monoculture yet.

Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

#269

Post by robotresearcher »

Kalium wrote: post #260
robotresearcher wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We import all kinds of stuff from all over the world and enforce quality standards very well. The current situation is more like protectionism than consumer protection in many cases.

While broadly true, this is an area where counterfeiting is easier, detection is difficult, enforcement is harder, and legitimate manufacturing is often expensive. In other words, exactly the conditions to encourage all kinds of abuses.

That is all true but we don't have to buy from shady producers. Canadian and European producers supply their own very safe and mature markets. Buy the stuff that the UK NHS buys and at the same prices - their scale gets them good deals (with notable exceptions). This can't be worse than the current deal.

Re: Drug Goes from $13.50 a Tablet to $750, Overnight

#270

Post by johansch »

nickff wrote: post #241
johansch wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this one of those very few cases were nationalisation of a company is called for?

Why do poor business decisions make a case for nationalization?

I have re-read your comment a dozen times, trying to grasp what you mean, and come up short each time. Are you a sociopath?
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